Friday, April 4, 2008

Gifted and Talented Admissions -- Confusion and Delay?

UPDATE (April 9th): As reported, the PEP will hold an emergency vote on April 10th to lower the cutoff to 90% for district G&T programs. Notification letters to be mailed "sometime this month".

In today's Daily News, Erin Einhorn reports DOE is rethinking where to set the cutoff for G&T admissions. The policy to set the bar at 95% cutoff on the two standardized tests , the OLSAT and BSRA was set in November.

At the time, many parents tried to convince the DOE that they were making a mistake. The District 3 CEC passed a resolution in opposition to the revised policy. In our letter to Manhattan parents explaining our vote against the G&T policy when presented to the Panel for Educational Policy, Manhattan Borough President Stringer and I raised the concern: "this higher cutoff score for admissions raises the very real possibility that a number of current programs will not be filled to capacity and will therefore be closed, leaving parents with fewer programming options".

Let's hope the DOE refrains from shuttering successful programs. Meanwhile, notifications have not been sent out, putting the whole process behind schedule, which was already pushed too far out into the spring.